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Wordy Wednesday (“Novel Inspiration”)

This week’s Wordy Wednesday is going to be an overview of how I got the inspiration for my novels, as suggested by my writing friend Joan of The Spastic Writer. (Check her out!)

I’ve written five novels so far, along with co-writing This Is a Book with Mel, and I’m currently writing a sixth novel. I’m only going to talk about a few of them today, though, because at least two of those manuscripts will never see the light of day (I pray to God). Let’s get started!

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Forgotten

What It’s About: Forgotten tells the intertwining stories of fourteen-year-old Janie Adams–a seemingly normal high school freshman–and fifteen-year-old Kyle Orchar–a spy working for the US government. When Kyle is assigned to track down a young terrorist at Janie’s high school, chaos ensues as Janie develops a crush on him and he decides she’s the terrorist. But who is Janie Adams really?

My Inspiration: I wrote Forgotten my freshman year of high school. At the time, I had never before read a spy book or seen a spy movie or even had any inkling of an interest in spies. But I somehow had gotten this random idea about a teenage boy spy falling in love with a civilian girl with a shifty past, so Forgotten was born anyway. Freshman year was fairly boring–my classes were easy and I didn’t have a lot of friends–so I basically just thought up things that would make my school experience more interesting, and that ended up being Forgotten.

The novel’s shallow and pretty poorly written, but I still love it for acting as my training wheels in the publishing industry. Although it’s the second novel I completed, it’s the first one I queried, and Forgotten really taught me the ins and outs of the process.

*****

Dreamcatcher

What It’s About: Dreamcatcher is about Lauren Brender, a sixteen-year-old girl who realizes she’s in a coma and the past several months of her life have actually been taking place in a dreamworld constructed by her subconscious to try to confuse her out of waking up. With the help of her conscience, personified in the dream-version of her best friend Joshua, she has to fight against her subconscious and the lures of the dream in order to return to reality–but is it worth it?

My Inspiration: This was the fourth novel I wrote, but the first one that I planned very much ahead of time. I wrote Dreamcatcher for NaNoWriMo my senior year of high school (Forgotten was my freshman year NaNoWriMo), and I began working on plans for it around March of my junior year.

The idea for Dreamcatcher came out of the fact that, at the time, I had a really huge crush on a boy who just wanted to be friends. I started having dreams in which we were together, and it made me start wondering: if I could stay in those dreams, which were nice but I knew weren’t real, would I? At the same time, I was in a creative writing class at school and needed to write a short story, so I decided to turn my question into my story. Only–after half a page or so, I realized it was going to be a much longer story than I could turn in for my assignment. So I saved it for a novel instead.

Dreamcatcher was the first novel I put a lot of myself into–writing it in order to help me through some problems I was having in my life at the time rather than just writing it for fun, the way Forgotten had been. It deals with divorce (some people I loved dearly were getting divorces at the time), and grief (I had lost both of my dad’s parents and my great-grandmother in the past three years, and my cat died while I was writing the first draft), and a lot of other stuff.

Although I’ve had to temporarily shelve Dreamcatcher because it needs a lot more work than I have the time or capability to do right now, I still think of it as my baby. I really hope someday I can get it good enough to publish, because it means the world to me.

*****

Cadence

What It’s About: Cadence tells the story of Olivia, a seventeen-year-old reluctant assassin who must work for an underground organization of vigilantes in downtown Chicago despite her aversion to their methods of dealing with people (basically: kill first, ask questions later) or find herself on the wrong side of the gun.

My Inspiration: The story behind Cadence is tricky. If you really want to go all the way back to the beginning, it starts with a novel I never finished called Petra’s Driving School, which was a companion to Forgotten. I got the idea for PDS in a dream the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school, because why not, and it was about a girl from downtown Chicago who gets kidnapped by a spy organization (called, you guessed it: Petra’s Driving School) and trained to become a “driver”–basically, the person who drives the getaway car for the spies of the organization Kyle of Forgotten works for. I worked on PDS for more than a year, but could never get it to work quite right, and I ultimately abandoned it.

Fast forward to the summer after my senior year, and I found myself with a whole new story–much darker and bigger–utilizing all the parts of PDS that I had loved.

When it comes down to it, Cadence and Petra’s Driving School are two very separate stories–they’re more like cousins than identical twins. But Cadence never would have happened without PDS.

Like with Dreamcatcher, a lot of the underlying themes of Cadence I took from my own life, as I worked through those questions and problems. Por ejemplo: where I left of with grief with Dreamcatcher, Cadence picks up.

*****

The End Where I Begin

What It’s About: The End Where I Begin is the story of eighteen-year-old Alexa Dylan, who lives in an alternate dimension in which alternate realities exist linearly of one another (basically: you can hop between them if you want to). When Alexa’s reality self-destructs, the government sends her on to the next reality linear to theirs, four years in the past, in order to prevent the same thing from happening there.

My Inspiration: This is the novel I’m working on right now. If everything goes as planned, it’ll be the sixth novel I finish, with Cadence being my fifth. With everything that’s been happening lately (going to college, making new friends, meeting celebrities, etc) I’ve been thinking a lot about change and how I’m basically a completely different person now from who I was at the beginning of high school. I wondered what would happen if someone who had graduated from high school got to go back to the beginning of their freshman year–What would they do different? What would they do their best to keep the same? That plus a fascination with alternate realities eventually led to the idea being The End Where I Begin.

What else will inspire a part of this novel? I guess I’ll find out as I go.

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So that’s it for today. Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me, here! (Whenever I think of Forgotten, it makes me feel really old.) If there’s a writing-related topic you’d like me to cover in a future Wordy Wednesday, make sure to vote for that option in the poll below and then let me know what you’d like me to talk about in the comments.

I used to think that writing a novel based on a dream was really weird (that assumption probably grew out of my dislike for S’meyer), but then one day I realized that like half my ideas come from dreams. What’s your story about?

Its some kind of mix between post-apocalipse and SciFi xD The story follows three protagonists and their journey and fight in the War of Fragments (one is a sole-survivor type, and the other two are twins wich one is at the “Le Resistance” side and the another is at the “Order” side). Well, is a book in portuguese but I have the first chapter here: http://heavenempire.forumeiros.com/t127-fragmentos-1o-capitulo

^^

The more strange about that three dreams is how they were easy to connect into a single book even in so different situations.

I, like you, usually write about people who are the same age as me. It looks like so far a lot of your novels have young adult themes. But the latest one you’re working on is about 18-year-olds, which would probably be categorized as new adult. Have you thought about catering your novel to a new adult audience? I’m just curious because I had a similar problem. My agent basically told me that I could write about anything I wanted to, but if there weren’t at least 25 shades of grey, it wouldn’t sell. If I wasn’t comfortable with that, she said, then I should write in a different genre.